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Congratulations to all of our 2016 graduates! After all this time together the libraries wouldn't abandon you to a libraryless existence. Here are a few of the resources available to you as a GW alumni.

Borrowing Privileges
Borrowing privileges are extended to GW Alumni for $50 per year. Payments should be made at the Circulation Desk in Gelman Library. For more information see details about Alumni borrowing privileges.

With the end of the semester comes the end of 24-hour access to Gelman Library. 24-hour access to Gelman Library is not available during the summer, but all of our online resources are available 24-hours a day to our current students, faculty and staff. Gelman will resume 24-hour access at the beginning of the Fall semester.

Commencement Week
Tuesday, May 10
Closing at 10 p.m.

Wednesday, May 11 - Friday, May 13
7 a.m. - 7 p.m.

Saturday, May 14 and Sunday, May 15
Noon - 6 p.m.

Summer Hours*
Summer hours begin Monday, May 16.

Monday - Friday
7 a.m. - 7 p.m.

Saturday & Sunday
Noon - 6 p.m.

*Closed May 29 & 30 for Memorial Day and July 3 & 4 for Independence Day.

In 1959, National Education Association Regional Vice-President Allan M. West visited the Soviet Union to evaluate its teaching conditions and professions. He was only one of 7000 US citizens to visit the communist country that year.

Looking for a secure spot to store small items while you are on campus? Gelman Library now offers lockers on the 4th & 5th floors for reservation by any GW student.

The Lockers on the 4th and 5th floors are located in the hallway past the bathrooms and are reserved on a “first-come / first-served” basis. Lockers rent for $35 per semester (Fall, Spring, and Summer). Locker rentals begin on the first day of classes for the semester and end on the last day of scheduled finals of the same semester. Students may rent lockers per semester or for the academic year (a total of 3 semesters, Fall, Spring and Summer).

To apply for a locker, please select a locker by taking the slip posted on the desired locker and complete the online request form (you must have the locker number to complete the form). A library staff member will contact you for an appointment to make the applicable payment and issue you a combination lock for the requested locker.

Scholarship on Teaching and Learning (SoTL) is a growing area of research and discussion at top universities across the country, and we are excited to be joining their ranks through this inaugural effort. GW faculty interested in the systematic inquiry of teaching and learning are invited to present their classroom research, big or small, completed or in progress, at a SoTL Poster Session that will be part of the 2016 GW Teaching Day on October 14, 2016.

The Eckles Prize is awarded to a freshman for a research project that shows significant and meaningful use of the resources and services available at the GW Libraries.

First year students are encouraged to submit a research project of any length or format, as well as an essay summarizing how library resources were used to complete that project. Students should enter the one project that they feel reflects their best work of the year.

Prizes are awarded to the top 3 submissions:

1st Place: $500
2nd Place: $300
3rd Place: $200

Visit go.gwu.edu/EcklesPrize to view the official instructions and criteria. You can also find a selection of past winning papers.

The deadline to apply is May 20, 2016. Winners will be announced in late summer. Winning students will present their papers during an awards ceremony in the fall.

Would your data make more sense shown on a map? Do you need to statistically analyze data over space?

ArcGIS is a geographic information system system (GIS) that allows people to collect, organize, manage, analyze, communicate, and distribute geographic information. Now you can learn and use this powerful software at Gelman Library! ArcGIS is available on all Gelman PCs (not Macs) and GIS specialist Kean McDermott is here to help you use it.

Good design habits can bring order and clarity to any document, from a business card to an oversize poster. Knowing when to apply harmony, contrast, balance and space to printed materials draws viewers and audience members in, focusing their attention on the ideas you wish to communicate. Learn the building blocks of successful design at this workshop presented by the GW Libraries' Exhibits Developer Phil Raino.

Do you plan to use artworks, photos, or diagrams to illustrate your thesis? Don't get snarled by copyright restrictions! Learn more about finding publicly accessible visual content and how to properly cite those images. We will also briefly discuss obtaining copyright permissions and creating your own images using widely available software.

The Global Resources Center (GRC) is now available to graduate students for late night study. Located on Gelman's 7th floor, the GRC remains open to all during staffed hours, but is now available 24-hours to graduate students via GWorld tap access. The GRC features multiple tables and chairs as well as public computers and a Colonial Printer.

The need for additional graduate student space is among our most often heard feedback. The changes needed to make this possible have been paid for by the voluntary library gift. The GW Libraries is committed to utilizing funds from the voluntary library gift to directly enhance the student experience. The voluntary library gift has recently been used to purchase and reupholster furniture, purchase 3-D printers, fund upgrades to the graduate student reading room (501), and fund student employees. We appreciate everyone who supports the libraries through the voluntary library gift.

Faculty, don't miss out on this opportunity to design or redesign a course in a supported, facilitated environment. Applications are due Friday, March 25, for the University Teaching and Learning Center's second annual Course Design Institute. Apply here.

In this “bootcamp” style program, modeled after a very successful program at the University of Virginia, faculty participants will be guided through a course (re)design process in a supported, facilitated environment to imagine, or re-imagine a course. All GW faculty members are invited to apply. The time commitment is an intensive 4.5 days as outlined on the block schedule.

There is no fee for CDI for those accepted. A limited number of professional development stipends will be available for full-time faculty who qualify. Food and many opportunities to collaborate with fellow faculty are an integral part of the experience. The CDI has proven relevant to any teaching mode, from in-person to blended to fully online learning.

Benefits: Faculty members walk away with:

A final (or near final) syllabus

Experiences with active learning and understanding of learning-centered design

Access to a resource-packed website

A community of faculty and UTLC staff for ongoing support during the academic year

Testimonials: Experiences from 2015 cohort:

I had heard of or tried course changes in a very ad hoc manner. I now see the big picture.

The CDI experience was beyond my expectations. It was a life changing experience.

My expectations were exceeded! This was incredibly inspirational and eye-opening. Come to think of it, I might have (subconsciously) expected a content-centered learning experience but, alas, it was very learning-centered!

It demystified the language of academic assessment.

Having other faculty to discuss challenges with, related and not-associated with my discipline, was a tremendous help. It was all about going out of my comfort zone.

CDI was an amazing experience. I believe every aspect was useful.

The Institute Process: An multi-disciplinary group of instructors spend 4.5 days designing or substantially (re)designing courses in order to promote significant, long-term learning. Participants explore learning-centered design principles in a large group setting and then work on their individual course designs in a small, discipline- or pedagogy-focused learning team. Teams provide brainstorming, individualized feedback, and on-going support opportunities. Institute Faculty will be available throughout the week for one-on-one consultations.

CDI Faculty: Michael Palmer, University of Virginia Associate Professor (Chemistry) & Managing Director of UVA’s Center for Teaching Excellence, who has led UVA’s highly successful CDI for nine years, and Patricia Dinneen, Director of the University Teaching & Learning Center, will co-teach general sessions. GW faculty members will facilitate the discipline-focused learning teams. All of the faculty will be available to provide one-on-one feedback and consultations throughout CDI.

Attendees: Any faculty member who has a syllabus to design or redesign, graduate or undergraduate. CDI is ideal for faculty members developing gateway courses and for groups working on a curricular design or interdisciplinary program. A limited number of $500 stipends are available for faculty members who qualify.

Applications: Participation is by application, and all GW faculty members are eligible to apply. Applications open February 19-March 2016. A limited number of stipends may be available for full-time faculty members who qualify and who complete CDI. Consideration for a stipend, via the application, include:

Please join us in the Global Resources Center (GRC) for an international student coffee hour co-hosted with the International Services Office (ISO). Take a tour of the GRC, chat with a specialist about your research and global interests, and enjoy a snack with your ISO friends!

New work also reveals the heightened importance of archived social media datasets that make it possible for researchers to re-use data. In order for this data to be useful, it must be curated and preserved with sufficient metadata to explain the conditions of its original capture and any subsequent actions taken to refine the data. For instance, a researcher may remove a particular hashtag or account as a study progresses, changing the resulting dataset. Archivists face a new mandate to develop tools and practices that support these conditions for re-use and reproducibility.

The Social Feed Manager team has heard this loud and clear! The need to keep track of changes to collection criteria (seeds, harvesting options, credentials, etc.) is reflected in our user stories for the new Social Feed Manager and initial support should be included in our next release (version 0.5.0). You can follow progress by watching the ticket. (Keep in mind that we are still pre-version 1.0, so SFM is in active development.)

We haven’t work on the UI yet, but this should give you an idea of how this feature works. First I created a new seed set. (This is an action that might be performed by a researcher or an archivist.) In SFM, a seed set is a list of seeds for a harvest, where a seed might be a Twitter handle or a Flickr user. Since the list is in reverse chronological order, the entry for creating the seed set is second. Second, I changed the schedule of the harvest. This is the first entry below.

Notice that whenever a change is made, the following is recorded:

Each field and value that is changed. In this example, the schedule was changed.

Who made this change. In this example, “justin” made the change.

When the change was made.

An optional note describing the reason for the change.

Again, the UI work is still to be done, but you can imagine an (understandable) version of these changes appearing when a user is reviewing a seed set.

Note that this change history is also tied into how we keep track of harvests -- SFM records the exact state of the collection criteria used to perform the harvest.

If you have thoughts on this feature, comments are welcome. In particular, we’re interested in ideas about how to make this information available and useful to researchers, especially in dataset exports. I can be reached @justin_littman or the whole team at sfm-dev.

On Feb 1, GW’s Expert Finder launched. Expert Finder is an implementation of VIVO, a researcher discovery platform. The project is a collaboration between the Division of Information Technology and GW Libraries. As one of the software developers on the project, I want to take this opportunity to discuss some noteworthy aspects of our implementation. In particular, we have made some choices that emphasized rapidly deploying VIVO using a minimal amount of resources.

In any VIVO implementation, data is aggregated from a number of existing sources, including campus information systems, researcher information systems, and human resource systems. At GW, the majority of our data comes from Banner, our campus information system, and Lyterati, a faculty management system.

With this sort of data, various quality issues are to be expected. At GW, our data is no different. Here are some examples:

The full citation for a journal article is “The Contraceptive Mandate and Religious Liberty. Pew Forum on Religion in Publick Life. 2013.” Notice the misspelling and lack of co-authors, issue, volume, pages, and a DOI.

Creating a new data source. For example, many VIVO implementers also implement Symplectic Elements to provide a reliable source for faculty publications.

Have researchers correct their own data either in the source system or directly in VIVO.

Data cleansing and normalization, both manually performed by a person and automated by software.

More than data cleansing and normalization, many VIVO implementers also perform data enhancement. Data enhancement involves collecting additional data to improve upon the existing data. So, for example, some institutions get a complete citation for journal articles by looking them up in Crossref or disambiguate article authorship using Harvard’s Disambiguation Engine.

For GW’s implementation, we have also employed some of these strategies to mitigate data quality issues. In particular, we have:

Worked with our partners at Entigence to make changes to Lyterati that encourage cleaner data entry by faculty.

Placed a heavy emphasis on researchers correcting their own data in the source system.

Created an interface for non-faculty staff to enter some of their data.

Notably absent from this list is data cleansing, normalization, or enhancements. Other than some minor fixes like the format of phone numbers, the data is loaded exactly as received from the source systems. This is deliberate, as the project charter for Expert Finder specifically excludes “cleanup of data.” The strategy of not performing data cleansing, normalization, or enhancements trades off a significant savings in resources (both for initial implementation and on an ongoing basis) for some data quality.

We use the strategy of suppressing some data in the VIVO interface to partially compensate for not cleaning or normalizing the data,. In particular, we remove links and lists where the less clean data would be revealed and/or prevent VIVO from working properly. So, for example, publications are listed on a researcher’s detail page, but the publications are not linked to the publication’s detail page. Also, a user can get to the list of organizations, but the lists of people, research, and events has been removed. This approach does a reasonable job of presenting the data for a researcher, but obviously at the expense of reduced functionality for discovery.

Also worth drawing attention to is our approach for non-faculty staff. GW faculty publication, education, and funding is collected in Lyterati, but there is no existing system for non-faculty staff (like us librarians). Rather than create a new system for this, we are asking non-faculty staff to create and populate ORCID records. Using orcid2vivo, we then retrieve this information using ORCID’s API and load into VIVO. The data from ORCID tends to be very high quality. For an example of a researcher detail page with data from ORCID, see https://expert.gwu.edu/display/justinlittman.

These approaches have allowed GW to rollout our Expert Finder in a relatively short timeframe (about a year) with a minimal amount of resources (part of a project manager and business analyst and a fraction of 3 software developers and a sys admin). We look forward to feedback from the GW community, as well as the opportunity to assess Expert Finder based on actual usage by users. This will allow us to make adjustments as necessary so that Expert Finder can showcase the expertise at GW and enable collaboration.

Under the combined effects of diminished university revenues and predatory inflation by publishers, academic libraries everywhere are facing serious financial constraints. Join us for a presentation and discussion of the GW Libraries' collection strategy, and learn more about how the Libraries use data in managing collections across the disciplines.

The weather may not feel like spring, but the calendar says it is Spring Break! For those of you spending your break in the warm embrace of Gelman Library, please note our change in hours. The library will not be available for 24-hour study during Spring Break (March 12-19).

How can the GW Libraries help you succed academically? What could Gelman do to help you be a better researcher, student or teacher? Join the conversation with the GW Libraries Student Liaison, librarians, archivists, and special guest @GWPeterK. Use the hashtag #GelmanTownHall or, on the day of, use this portal to see the entire town hall thread!

Gelman Library will close on Saturday, February 20 at 10:30 p.m. and reopen on Sunday, February 21 at 9 a.m. No building access will be available during this time. This overnight closure is required to safely complete necessary construction activities for the National Churchill Library and Center on Gelman’s 1st floor. Work is being performed at night to minimize disruption to our library users.